The upcoming AMD Radeon R9 390X “Fiji” graphics card, which will be the first to use high-bandwidth memory (HBM), will undoubtedly be one of the hottest hardware items on the market this summer. Unfortunately there’s the saying “Too good to be true” and it might as well be easily applied to Fiji – the card will arrive with a really high price tag and it appears its production will be limited as well.
Preliminary estimates price the card at USD 849, which is really expensive for a graphics card. Assuming that this price is the real one, it can be easily justified – the Radeon R9 390X will be the first consumer graphics card ever to come with HBM memory and it will bring unrivalled performance levels. In case you do not know HBM memory is two times faster than the current GDDR5 generation, while consuming half the power. In addition the next explanation for this high price is the complex manufacturing process used for the making of HBM memory and the high numbers of bad memory chips. But there’s a third reason – the high price will be used for marketing purposes and this reason deserves a separate paragraph.
It turns out AMD might use the power of the Radeon R9 390X to polish its image in front of consumers. In other words Radeon R9 390X will serve as AMD’s version of the GeForce GTX Titan X and will prove to everyone that AMD is a serious hardware company that can produce powerful hardware especially in the light of underperforming AMD desktop processors, when compared to Intel’s chips. Furthermore the improved company image will create more AMD fans and will make people purchase the company’s slower and older graphics cards. There’s some information on the Internet that claims most of the Radeon 300 series cards will consist of re-branded Radeon R9 200 series graphics cards so this strategy, if real, might have its logical explanation.
So to sum it up – expect the Radeon R9 390X to cost tons of cash – first the card brings state-of-the-art technology that is hard to make, then the Radeon R9 390X will be an ultra high-end video card and third – AMD wants you to buy cheaper video cards, which serves the company’s marketing strategy and financial results better.
The Radeon R9 390X is expected in early June 2015 at the upcoming Computex 2015.
Source: Sweclockers.com